Assyrtiko

When you think of Greece these days, you sadly might think of financial crises, bailouts, maybe even riots in the streets. Don’t think of those things. Don’t even think of Greece at all. Instead think of the Greek island of Santorini, a beautiful if slightly forbidding sun- and wind-swept island about halfway between Crete and the Greek mainland. The site of a massive explosion about 1600 BC, the middle of the island sank into the ocean, leaving Santorini a crescent-shaped, rugged, steeply-terraced landscape based on deep layers of volcanic ash and schist, metamorphic rocks that are high in minerals and whose name, coincidentally, derives from a Greek work that means “to split,” referring to the way the rocks fracture along…